Lessons from a Gold Medal Champion

There is so much we can learn from watching the Olympics. A great example of that is Shaun White, the gold medal snowboarder. I saw an interview with him and he talked about having a big fall at the X-games before coming to the Olympics where he missed his landing and crashed and cut his face. I saw a video of it and I can tell you that fall would have devastated me. Of course, I wouldn’t be doing 360 flips in the air on skis to start with. My talents lie elsewhere. Anyway, he immediately went back up the hill and tried again. Shaun said the reason he did that was because he knew that if he waited it would mess him up mentally and he would be thinking about the bad landing and the time when he fell.

I was so inspired by that and think it is a great lesson for all of us. I always talk about learning from your mistakes, but the idea of immediately moving forward again makes a lot of sense. Because otherwise the image of the mistake forms a neural pathway in your brain and your mind replays that mistake going forward. Then you have to deal with releasing that as a block later on. But if you pick yourself up immediately, there is no time for that old image to stick, you are quickly replacing it with a new one.

I was so inspired by this and quickly applied that lesson to my life where I saw that I was getting stopped because a conversation regarding an opportunity didn’t go as I had hoped. Instead of spending any more time feeling badly about it, I went forward and engaged in another conversation to see what else was possible. It felt great to move forward that quickly and just doing it boosted my mood.

Where can you apply this lesson to your career, your business or your life?